Did Seinfeld Create Hipsters?
‘The Butter Shave’ and other arguments
By @larry_ryan
Illustration by @JackySheridan
Some years back a Twitter account called @SeinfeldToday briefly got attention. In 140 characters it suggested new plots for the sitcom, which concluded in 1998, if the show was still running now; it was lamely obvious but also reasonably enjoyable for a second, simply because it prompted you to think about Seinfeld which is a fun thing to do (its thunder was later thieved by another, more surreal Seinfeld parody account — and let’s not even get into Buzzfeed’s execrable ‘if Friends was set in 2015’ list). Before the joke ran out of juice a minor theory was planted in my head. Take these few examples from @SeinfeldToday:
Modern Seinfeld @SeinfeldToday16 Apr Kramer discovers people in Brooklyn are dressing like him. George learns when you search his name, Google suggests “George Costanza Gay.”
Modern Seinfeld @SeinfeldToday4 Mar Jerry convinces Babu Bhatt to open a food truck. The truck is stolen. “Kramering” (bursting into rooms) becomes an Internet sensation.
Modern Seinfeld @SeinfeldToday29 Jan Kramer opens a speakeasy in his apartment JERRY: “Why a speakeasy? Bars are legal. Just go to a bar!” KRAMER: “You don’t get cool, Jerry!”
Which is to say, if Kramer was around now, we’d call him an aging hipster. So jumping back to the mid 90s, when the sitcom was in its pomp, Kramer was the original hipster. That’s my theory. Giddyup.
Scanning through some events from the show and you’ll find from his wacky first name — Cosmo — on down, the man set set the hipster tone:
- A ‘haircut’, plus an array of vintage and second hand clothing; the occasional outlandish outfit.
- Never having a stable job or a discernable source of income but somehow able to afford rent in New York and the general makings of an easy life. We’ve all met and enviedy/admired/hated someone like that in the last 15 years.
- Constantly taking on random jobs and gigs — he was the ultimate ‘slash’: actor/ photographer/ model/ ballboy/ seat filler at the Tonys/ office jockey/ author / inventor / innovator. We could go on for a while here.
- An absurd bike.
- In on the ground floor with every fad going: swimming in the East River; planning a restaurant that allows you to make your own pizza (with unusual toppings), proposing a restaurant called PB&Js that only serves peanut butter and jelly; investing in a frozen yogurt shop; exact knowledge of a must-have sandwich only available at a particular train station; using butter as a shaving lubricant; mackinaw peach season. You could confidently place all of these — and many more — in bogus trend pieces in the New York Times Style section on any given Thursday.
- When an artisan soup deli becomes the hottest thing in the city, complete with long queues and arcane ordering rules, Kramer of course knows the guy behind the soup. While everyone else is fretting about their ordering technique, Kramer’s at the counter shooting the breeze with the Nazi.
- At various stages Kramer hosts popup events in his apartment: a cigar club, a chatshow.
- He likes golf.
- His liberal use of Jerry’s fridge proves he had an early grasp on our Kickstarted, freely-downloaded, sharing economy. He’s also pals with a video bootlegger to boot.
- He has his own array of noises and catchphrases that could go toe to toe with Nathan Barley.
We’re at a moment where the word hipster no longer means anything and is used to define everything — scanning recent headlines — from hamburgulars to cops to bespoke Dubai villages. Sensibility-wise it also seems that the jaded, seen-it-all attitude of the hipster era is passing with the kids who are coming up from behind exuding a more positive air. What better time, then, to speculate on who was the original hipster?
As with the beginning of punk you could scrabble around for an eternity trying to pinpoint the origins and first proponents of the tiresomely maligned hipster. A friend and I once proposed that Dylan was the first hipster but Yoko Ono was the first hipster douchebag, which I would still stand behind. But to get to the ground zero of the hipster at its 2000s zenith/nadir (depending on your mood) with that distinct combination of irony and self-conscious cool; crate-digging taste and trashy aesthetic; first on the scene in-the-knowingness; vague sources of finance and an ability to afford life without a normal dayjob; always knowing-a-guy-who-knows-a-guy; you have to go to the early part of that decade and to the 90s, and you have to obviously head to New York.
Here you’ll find the classic hipster prototypes: your Beastie Boys, your Chloe Sevingys, your James Murphys, a Terry Richardson. Early Vice-man Gavin McInnes would have to be in the mix too.
But as we can see from Seinfeld, bursting in the door ahead of them all is Cosmo Kramer. The character unwittingly created a movement, a subculture, a species. He never lost his edge.
In the last 18 months or so, a hipster offshoot arrived in the form of normcore; since showing up up in its khaki pants, normcore has been used, misused, abused and warm-taked into oblivion. Jerry Seinfeld, meanwhile, in his blandly unremarkable normcore-like outfits (straight-leg jeans, tucked in shirt, Nike sneakers) has been held up as an unlikely style avatar.
It should also be pointed out that Jerry was taking cereal way too seriously long before everyone lost their shit about that cafe.
If then, normcore is a sort of new wave to hipster’s punk, if you will (with apologies to everyone), then we can see Jerry as a David Byrne figure and Kramer in the proto-punk role of Iggy Pop. The bog-standard joke about hipster culture prods at such people’s obsession with being there first; knowing about a thing before it is popular. I was into gazpacho before it was cool.
Now take this quote from Michael Richards, the since disgraced actor who played Kramer, about how he got to the heart of the character in the early stages. “The real key came about eight or nine shows in,” he says. “I had been playing him as if he were slow-witted, always one step behind. Then I learned to play Kramer as if he were blocks ahead of what everyone’s saying — and I had him.”
First among equals. He was there.
Let’s give the final word to one of the many girlfriends Kramer cycles through in the show’s nine year run. In The Handicap Spot from season 4 (long before hipster had acquired its elevated standing of the last decade and a half), one such girlfriend dumps Kramer, dismissing him as a “a hipster doofus”. In a later episode Elaine also uses the insult against him. They saw the future.
